Finding the moon
by Madhumalati
Summary: Fujitaka didn't know what he was getting in for when he brought the Book of Clow home. Touya, however.....set before the anime.


Shounen-ai; implied, but very present. You have been warned.

_**Finding the Moon**_

A CCS fanfic.

He'd brought a book home, and he didn't enquire further into where he'd found it. His memory of those few hours was hazy, and all he could remember was that he'd been to a large house of some sort and found it there. Or been given it. There was a boy in that house, but thinking about it for too long gave him a headache, and he knew he hadn't stolen it, so (with some relief) he stopped wondering how he'd come across the book.

It was a curious thing with an old-fashioned lock, a journal of some sort, he supposed, with interesting symbols on the back and front. Fujitaka toyed with it absently on the way home. It felt odd, somehow. Tingly, as if it contained electricity, and disturbingly familiar. He was looking forward to reading it once he was home.

When he got there, though, Nadeshiko wasn't home; she'd left a note saying she'd taken Touya to get some ice-cream. Fujitaka smiled when he read that. Touya didn't get out a lot, and he hated being with other children; the only time he went anywhere was with his mother.

He made dinner, waiting for them to come home. The book lay forgotten on the sofa. It continued to lie there after they came home and while they had dinner. It was only afterwards that he remembered.

Every evening mother and son played the organ, and Fujitaka usually did his paperwork in the same room while listening to them. That evening he finished his work quicker than normal, humming absently with the music; fetched the book, meaning to read it.

'Dad,' Touya said, and Fujitaka started. It was only Nadeshiko playing now; his son was standing in front of him, his serious dark eyes boring into his father's.

'Yes, Touya?' he said, smiling.

'You brought home the moon,' the boy said, his eyes turning to the book in his father's hands.

'The moon?' His son had said some strange things before, but……

'The moon.' Touya gestured impatiently at the book. 'He's in there. He's waiting.'

'I don't understand,' he said and made to open the book. The moon?

A small, firm grip stopped his hand before it undid the latch. 'It's not for you.'

'What is it, Touya?' Nadeshiko said, sliding off the stool and coming over to them.

'You mustn't open the book, Dad,' Touya said, strong and sure, not at all like a four-year-old. 'It's not supposed to be opened yet.'

'Fujitaka,' his wife said, and the professor looked at her. One long finger was brushing delicately over the surface of the book, and she looked like she'd seen a ghost. 'Maybe you should listen to him. There's something about this book…… I don't think you should touch it.'

He gave in, of course. His wife and son had the oddest instincts, but they were never wrong, and they so rarely put their foot down this hard; he was rather bewildered by it. He kept the book buried deep in his library, where nobody else went.

Except for Touya. Several times Fujitaka saw him there, looking at the book but never touching it, frowning with fierce concentration. He asked him once whether he wanted the book for his own, but Touya refused so categorically that he never asked again. It isn't for me, either, he insisted.

Over time he accepted it as one of his son's many quirks, and forgot about it entirely as his attention was absorbed by other things. Sakura was born, and then Nadeshiko grew ill. He barely had any time left for Touya, but he didn't seem to mind. Quietly, he took over the house, doing homework and housework and even taking care of Sakura when Fujitaka was in the hospital with his wife. Amazingly, his grades didn't even slump. He was so capable and independent that Fujitaka often forgot that he was only eight years old. The normally silent and serious boy became withdrawn and almost mute. The only time he allowed himself to smile was when he was with his mother, and after she died they stopped entirely.

Sometime after the funeral, the book moved from his library to Touya's room, lying on his desk. Fujitaka noticed, and Touya saw him noticing, but they never spoke of it.

Those were very quiet years for the Kinomoto house. Fujitaka did the housework; Touya took care of Sakura. Fujitaka filed his papers and prepared lectures; Touya did his schoolwork in his room. They met for mealtimes, their conversations stilted and formal; two people had been but were inexplicably no longer family. Sakura was their only bond.

Sometimes Fujitaka felt as if he had lost his son, too.

Sakura was six. Fujitaka was working when Touya brought the book back. The teenager – teenager, Fujitaka realised with some shock, he was thirteen now, tall and slender and remote – handed it to him, never even looking at Fujitaka. Touya turned to leave and he reached out a hand on some sudden impulse. 'Wait,' he said.

He turned, polite inquiry the only emotion on his face. Fujitaka felt embarrassed, as if he were interrogating a complete stranger. Which, he realised with rising guilt, was exactly what he was to him. 'Yes?'

'Don't you want the book anymore?'

'I was just borrowing it. I don't need it anymore.'

Fujitaka turned the book over and over in his hands, restless. Touya stood there, waiting patiently for him……to see something. 'The moon,' the professor said finally. 'The moon on the back cover. It's gone.' As if it had never been.

The faintest twitch of Touya's lips, one that held no trace of happiness. 'I know,' he said simply and left.

Fujitaka paid closer attention to his son after that. Touya didn't seem to exhibit any signs of normal teenage behaviour. There were no sleepovers, no late evenings with friends, no anger, no rebellion, and no moodiness. If anything, he went through life with a sort of deliberate emptiness. There was little emotion in him, and he didn't seem to want any. He held a tremendous number of odd jobs, becoming mostly financially independent before he was even old enough to be truly employed. He had no friends over to study or pal around with. Except for his relationship with Sakura, he seemed to seek no contact of any sort. His grades were impeccable, his athletic abilities among the best in the school; everything he did, he did with an obsessive desire for perfection, as if he were trying to meet some goal, achieve some standard. For the easy-going archaeologist, this was hard to understand, but there wasn't much he could do.

He saw Touya look at the book a few times, and his expression was puzzling as he touched the book lightly, tentatively. Wistful regret, then pain, then a painful sort of hope – and then the nanosecond of expression would pass and that familiar disturbing emptiness would descend, turning his face blank and his eyes dead.

When he was fifteen, he brought a friend home for the first time. Fujitaka was mildly surprised, but he took it in stride. After all, young Tsukishiro was a very nice boy, and he and Touya seemed to get along very well.

It quickly became a routine to have him over. He had half expected Tsukishiro to be the first of many friends, but apparently Touya hadn't changed that much. After a week or so, they were calling each other by their first names. Within two, they had slipped – unconsciously, he suspected – into nicknames. Touya wasn't known for his impulsiveness, but his friendship with Yukito became so close so quickly that Fujitaka was stunned by it. It was as if they knew each other before, somehow, because within a month they were finishing each other's sentences, and Yukito indulged in a subtly merciless sort of teasing that Touya bore with good grace, something he normally detested.

On occasion, complaining loudly all the time, he would allow Yukito – Yuki, he called him, and it was only the second time Touya had ever given someone a nickname – to drag him to public places, amusement parks, games. He objected less loudly when Yukito made them both enrol in the football club, objected not at all when he came over for dinner six times a week, and even went so far as to invite him to sleep over when they were studying together.

Outwardly, Touya was just the same he had always been. He was still remote and distant with everyone, still obsessively perfectionist. But that frightening void was receding from him, and occasionally, when he thought no one was looking, Fujitaka could see emotions in his midnight eyes again; laughter, worry, concentration, sadness, reflection, hope.

Some two years after Yukito and Touya became friends, Fujitaka decided to reorganise his library. In a fit of uncharacteristic friendliness, Touya agreed to help him. While they were replacing the last few books on their shelves, Fujitaka noticed that that book Touya was so fixated on was missing from the bunch. Timidly, almost, he asked him whether he had taken the book again.

'No,' his son said, looking suddenly older than his years, older, even, than Fujitaka himself. Or was it simply that he looked wiser? 'Sakura has it now. I told you I didn't need it anymore, and it wasn't mine anyway.'

'It's hers, isn't it,' Fujitaka said with a flash of insight. 'She was the one.'

Touya nodded. 'I knew it was for her. He told me so. I've just been taking care of it for a while.'

For the sake of his sanity, Fujitaka didn't ask who 'he' was; he had received some very strange answers to questions like that in the past. Touya was startlingly truthful, and Fujitaka believed him, but the things he saw and knew made Fujitaka very uneasy.

'I remember when I brought it home,' he said. 'You said I had brought home the moon. But later,' he continued, almost in a trance from the memory, 'you said……you said……'

'That the moon was gone.'

'I watched you when you looked at that book, you know,' Fujitaka said, suddenly daring. 'You looked so sad and so happy at the same time.'

Touya watched him, careful and intent.

'What was in there, Touya?'

'I don't know,' he said, frowning. 'I'm beginning to find out, though. But you mustn't. It's not time for that yet.'

'Time for what?'

But he remained silent.

'Touya, you said that the moon was gone.'

For the first time in seven years, Touya smiled at his father. It was unexpected and shockingly beautiful and Fujitaka wondered how he could have forgotten how his son smiled, like sunlight on skin. He was so caught by that smile that it wasn't until his son left the room that his quiet reply registered.

'I did. But it's back now.'

Which was ridiculous, Fujitaka decided. He even checked that odd book where it lay on Sakura's desk – he didn't open it, mindful of his son's warning – but the moon on the back was still gone.

The next evening, he walked in from work, late as ever, to hear the sounds of people eating in the dining room. Touya, Sakura and Yukito, the pale-haired boy polishing off gigantic quantities of food while arguing amiably with Touya and taking Sakura's side against him as always. By chance, that odd sixth sense Touya and Yukito possessed wasn't functioning normally, because it was a full three seconds before they looked up to see Fujitaka.

Those three seconds felt like much longer to Fujitaka. Yukito's hand rested absently on Sakura's head, and she and Touya were mock-snarling at each other. Touya was looking at Yukito, and that ugly void was gone completely, his eyes warm and open and trusting……loving……as they hadn't been since the day his mother died. Yukito was smiling back, oblivious of the added layer of affection in his best friend's eyes but accepting it instinctively. In that instant, he knew that the three of them were bound tight, and that he wasn't part of that……family. It was a lonely feeling, but he couldn't bring himself to care right now, not when he could finally know for sure that Touya wasn't going to go back to being that way again, that he was going to live and love and be happy. Because he did want the best for his children, both of them.

For an instant, he felt removed from the scene before him, as if someone else were watching it through him – with him. That someone was smiling, Fujitaka was sure of it, and with a strange double-vision he could see something superimposed on all of them, a sort of glow like an aura, Sakura's pink, Touya's dark green and Yukito's dazzling silver, and was it just his imagination or were there transparent wings flexing behind his back, and a fall of silver hair between them?

Only an instant, and then the vision was gone and they were just two boys and a girl eating a meal together, and that strange presence was gone as if it had never been.

Touya's voice rang in Fujitaka's mind.

_The moon's gone. _

_But it's back now._

And looking at the two of them, Fujitaka thought he could make an educated guess.

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A/N: Before anyone jumps on me for not having Kaho in there, please keep in mind that Fujitaka probably doesn't know much about her relationship with Touya and this story's from his POV. I just wanted to write something Touya and Fujitaka oriented; they act like they don't know each other, and Touya speaks to him directly only some ten times in the entire series. It's quite a strained relationship, or that's how I see it. Anyway. R&R, please.


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